Some of those games stuff those scenes in almost at random. It's why the anime adaptations don't tend to have any noticeable missing elements in the plots, because excising them doesn't do anything. This isn't always the case, as the scene with the CG dragon in the first Fate/Stay Night anime will tell you.

Also, the clean version for consoles is a common enough phenomenon that I'm guessing any company with big enough ambitions will intentionally design the game so the sex scenes can easily be removed without hurting anything.

The plot writing in 4 was just bad. There were really interesting ideas, and the character interaction was pretty good, but the "Kids vs Adults" thing was really weird and the game occasionally dropped random bizarre elements in optional conversations. I remember that in some laboratory place, there was a completely out of place reference to evolution "just being a theory with no evidence". It was an optional thing that I got by accident, but it was just so random that it sticks in my mind.

In Wild Arms 5, the biggest problem is just that Dean isn't just an idiot hero. He's a complete moron.

Shadow Hearts starts off almost dead serious and then it starts going insane when the possibly gay vampire is introduced in the second game (Shadow Hearts Covenant) and the third game is completely bonkers, while not getting rid of the dark elements. For example, two of the characters in Shadow Hearts: From the New World are a Brazilian ninja trained in a secret Japanese village that's inexplicably in the Amazon rainforest, and a vampire that feeds on fat.DDS and Nocturne, on the other hand, are much more serious. With the exception of Cielo's out of place accent in DDS.

DDS and Nocturne have the Press Turn battle systems where you get extra moves for hitting weaknesses and passing turns. Persona 3 and 4 use a stripped down version of it. Shadow Hearts has the Judgement Ring where you need to hit certain points on a disc for any actions in battle to work. The first Shadow Hearts uses the Judgement Ring for a ton of things outside of battle as well. For some reason, the Spirit of the Judgement Ring is actually a character in Covenant and his daughter is a character in From the New World.

Essentially, DDS and Nocturne are straight cosmic horror done very well, while Shadow Hearts is a cosmic horror that eventually develops a bizarre and insane sense of humor. There's nothing else quite like it.

Is a Persona 4 Golden anime necessary? Of COURSE it's not. Am I still going to watch it? Of COURSE I am. Also, considering the time that the livestream came on in Japan, I am willing to bet that those dudes were quite inebriated and/or pretty exhausted.

I can honestly say, even as a huge persona fan, I WILL NOT be watching P4 Golden The Anime. Since Persona 4 came out, I played P4, watched the anime, played enough P4 arena to get sufficiently sick of it, played P3, watched Trinity Souls, played P2 IS, played P2 EP, and have since moved into the SMT world I missed out on in past years... At this point I can't really say much of anything will peak my interest until there is some more P5 news. I feel like my apatite for existing persona material is beyond satiated at present.

I will say however, that a desire to finally get to Digital Devil Saga has been growing within me as of late. That is really the only leg of the SMT franchise left that I have zero experience with.

Do it! DDS is excellent. It takes the gameplay of Nocturne, refines it a bit and is much more story focused.

Yeah welll, uh... I don't say this as a fan since I wouldn't exactly call myself a fan of FF like most people that is into this, but for what I've seen in all the years I've been following the series is that people treat FF like it's some kind of tough love, and that's without mentioning the awkward abusive relationship SQEX maintains with its audience that really looks like Stockholm syndrome sometimes.

As I see it though, the"problem" is that FF has this thing that can basically start itself over again with a brand new game that is very much a product of its time. So when people want to see SQEX go back to a certain entry in the series, that goes against what part of FF has always been about.

So, the problem of FF is not so much that is dying. Is more about that one of the aspects that is the strength of what makes the series what it is over time became one of his biggest weaknesses for a lot of people.

That is true. The only thing that has been consistent across the entire series is Cid, and I think a reference to Cid of the Lufaine had to be added back into FFI in a remake. Everything else was added later or removed. Although bizarre time-space shenanigans do pop up surprisingly often, starting with the original.

The story score does seem really low. If I saw that part of the score without context, I would assume the game made no sense whatsoever with incomprehensible writing and no consistency with the characters. If the story makes sense and the characters are consistent, I would think it would get at least 50-60%. 10% makes it seem like the story is broken in some very fundamental way.

I think part of it might be that Vesperia did not use motion capture, so the character designs could be more stylized. Dawn of the New World was the first Tales game with motion capture and the characters jitter around like they've had too much coffee and while it isn't as bad, it's still present in Graces and Xillia. Weird proportions don't work too well with motion capture, as Eternal Sonata shows.

Why do so many people assume it's spelled with an apostrophe anyway? It's not in any of the logos, and it's the name of an actual historical legend. The sunken city of Ys off the coast of France that sank because the princess forgot to lock the flood-gates before the tide came in.

And I think it's pronounced Ees, because that's the traditional pronunciation of the lost city.

This is a typical Aniplex release, so bear in mind, it's not the North American release. I know that sounds really strange, but it's the import of the Japanese special edition for cheaper than it would be if you bought it from Japan. If it does well, Aniplex will probably get around to a less expensive release exclusive to North America. Maybe with a dub. Or maybe not. It's kind of hard to predict.